Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone in lake charles and Cameron Parish and that whole area. We will speaking earlier and saying that theyre gonna probably have many weeks if not months of no power and having trouble with their water system. Even people as far north as shreveport and monroe are still without power. Our thoughts go out to them. Anyway, we are here and of today with jack davis in conversation with our author. Jack is the professor of history, specializing in environmental history of sustainability studies. Also the author of the pulitzer prizewinning the goals are the making of an american sea. New york times beautiful homage to a neglected lexi. In addition to the pulitzer prize, the gulf was a New York Times notable book for 2017 and made several other best of list for that year including the washington post, npr and forbes. Jack, welcome, pleasure to have you with us today. My pleasure to be here. Im going to turn the floor over to jack and eric and let them start the conversation. One final thing, people have questions they can write in the chat room and we will try to get to those questions, if not during the talk, at the very end. Also encourage people who have not gotten erics new book we will have signed copies here at the bookshop and yall can go to our website which is www. Gardendistrictbookshop. Com. Place orders or just give us a call. We are happy to ship books for you anywhere in the country and anywhere in the world. Thank you. We will start with me introducing eric. Im sure you are familiar with erics work, he he is a prolific author, is a nonfiction writer who specializes in writing history that is really geared for ab intellectual curious abthe type of history that doesnt put you to sleep. One of his more notable books hes won numerous awards for his books, among his more notable ones device and a history of wailing a New York Times bestseller and another quite notable book i read a couple years ago his last book before proceeding the furious sky was black lives, bluewater. A book about the history of pirates. That large history wasnt large enough so he was going to tackle hurricane history and i read this book and someone who grew up in florida and lives in florida abunfamiliar with hurricane history. The books that have been written on hurricane history have known for a long time, we been due for a good book on hurricane on hurricanes. Its a huge huge topic. Eric tackled it masterfully, despite it being so huge he was able to put in the book that you can actually hold in your hands. Its a lovely book. As i said. Im really looking forward to having this conversation with eric today. I want to start by asking eric, why did you decide to write this book on hurricanes . Why did you decide to undoubtedly abof some level to try to figure out how to bring this into something that was a manageable one. I long thought about writing a book about hurricanes but the problem was, i wanted to write about a particular hurricane and the two hurricanes i was most interested in where the galveston hurricane of 1900 and the great hurricane of 1938, which hit long island and new england where i happened to live. There was a problem there, both of those hurricanes have already had quite a few really good books written about them. So i put the idea aside, and went on to write abthen come the summer and fall of 2017, the Hurricane Season from hell. When we had hurricane harvey, irma and maria, like destroy different parts of the United States. Right after that season was over, somebody you know very well, bob wilde, my editor, your editor, got together with the head of sales at the time, bill roos and and they thought there should be a book on the history of americans hurricanes and the thought of me because a number of my books spanned the centuries and i seemed to have a particular talent for pulling together and synthesizing huge amounts of information into a readable narrative. They reached out to my literary agent and asked him if i would be interested in writing a book about hurricanes and he in turn reached out to me and i didnt immediately say yes because before i sign on to do a book i have to have a vision of what that book is going to look like. I didnt know a lot about hurricanes in the time that i mentioned so i went on for about a month and and a half and i read a ton of books, articles and primary accounts of hurricanes and on the whole book sort of came into view and i said, okay, i will write the book and put together the proposal and the rest is history. You said you had this vision of writing the book or what it would look like, as you are writing the book and when you came to completing it did you find yourself staring at Different Directions to make this book into what you wanted and something that would appeal to your reading audience . It stayed pretty much as i envisioned on the outset, partly because before i start the book or when i put together a book proposal has spent a lot of time making notes and outlining where i think the book is in ago. I wont sign a book contract until im reasonably confident that ive outlined the book the way i wanted to go. There were some surprises and stories that didnt make it in the book or other stories i discovered along the way but believe it or not, the general outline and the rough chapter outline, which i developed a little bit later, stayed fairly constant. Part of that is a function of my books tend to be chronological. Most often they march through history in a chronological fashion. Once you know the general lay of the land and you know its a big ticket stories are that you want to incorporate and what the big themes are its a matter of just putting flesh on the bones but there are always surprises when you write a book. At least for me. Thats because virtually everyone in my books except for one of them was on a topic i didnt know a huge amount about before i started working on it and i do that on purpose because i have to spend almost 2 years working on these books. I tend to get bored easily. If i dont pick a topic that is going to excite me every couple weeks or maybe every day, then its gonna be a problem and one of the best ways to do that is to pick a topic that im not an expert in. Because then im guaranteed to be surprised along the way and that surprise and excitement not only fuels my work on the book but im hoping that it translates to some extent to the written page. I think it does, at least in my opinion. Lets talk a little bit about the writing process itself. He talked about chapter outlines. abdo you find your outlines more loose . And how about research, do you complete your research before you sit down to write . Or are you researching along the way . Obviously you been writing books for a long time, we do Research Today very different than we did, not too many years ago. With archives across the country. Now archives abthe archives often just our study with the computer in front of us. You know what happened if it is involved over time you are involved in many levels. My first book for norton was this first wailing book. They did know me from adam, i wrote six or seven books before that but they werent large prices are major publishers. It was almost 100 pages long, very detailed outlined of the chapter. Since i stayed with norton for six books now, theyve gotten to know me they trust me more, my proposals have over time got shorter and shorter. The actual proposal for the hurricane book i think only weighed in at seven doublespaced pages. More like an essay of a what i thought the book was can be about. Behind that i had a rough idea of the chapters that i used for my purposes and so yes you have to have a map in order to get someplace but my map has become less and less detailed over time and id like to think that in part because ive gotten better at this process and i sort of know more quickly what are the things that i want to talk about in the book and what direction do i want a book to go in but you talk about researching. Its changed tremendously. When i was starting writing books in the late 1990s i would almost always have to go to very specialized libraries to get the information i needed and it was rarely digitized. Even some of these places didnt have good copy machines. I was taking a lot of hand notes, which is a real problem for me because i flunked handwriting in elementary school. I have very poor handwriting and i dont write fast. So using a typewriter was good back then or when computers came in and started using computers but what happened in the last 10 or 15 years its an entire seachange, so much as digitized, not only google books which allows you to access virtually any book written before 1923, almost any topic but a lot of the Major Research institutions around the country have spent a lot of money and time digitizing some of their key documents. With a few keystrokes i can quickly be overwhelmed with data. Just today im working on a new book on privateering in the American Revolution. I was doing research on it today. I was reading a book i think from 1850. That book mentioned a certain privateer. I got on google and put in the privateers name and one of his vessels and all the sudden six or seven other documents in the 1800s and early 1900s that talk about this privateer. I start to because they either a story. The big problem with this book was not a lack of information, the big problem was deciding what the huge amount of data that was available to me what do i use . If i were to make hundreds of decisions about what to leave out and what not to read. What were you looking for in the history of individual hurricanes that made the grade for the book. Was there particular criteria you wanted this to include . In order to include hurricane . Not sure it was criteria but what draws me the most i certainly right books in the manner i would like to read them. I love Human Interest stories. The stories go fastest they leave the deepest impression of me when its a story of people battling against the odds, dealing with adversity or just planning in the face of what is likely to come. I love the stories about the individuals that survive and didnt survive various hurricanes. I love the stories of the meteorologists and the politicians and the other people that got swept up into the story both good and bad. Because i think that people gravitate most easily to stories about other human beings being put in unique situations and hurricanes certainly fill that bill. I didnt spend as much time talking about administrative stuff and regulations and that kind of stuff, i really wanted to focus on the human side of the story. Thats what i liked about your book and some of the other hurricane books that have been written, they post on the administrative side or climatology and they leave out the Human Interest. Your book reminded me of whats Marjory Stoneman douglas original hurricane, it was a bridge and very much a Human Interest story and i love that book. When we think of Marjory Stoneman douglas we think of the everglades river of grasp. But the book of hurricanes is right up there with the rest of them. Certainly a book i needed to be updated which you clearly done. So what are some of the surprises that stand out in your mind that you want to share with us that kept you glued to the desk writing . One of the big surprises is how hurricanes have affected the course of American History, in your state alone i was fascinated to read about in the 1550s in the 1560s when the spanish were trying to settle florida and how the first settlement in pensacola was basically wiped out by hurricane and just think about how history mightve changed did that settlement survive. Also years later on the east coast of florida there was a Battle Royale between the french and the spanish who were both interested in colonizing florida and the french, which had a very formidable fleet was about ready to attack the spanish who had settled a little further to the south and what is now saint augustine, right at the moment when the french were getting ready to launch their attack a hurricane comes along and basically wiped out half the french fleet. Then the spanish kill most of the french stragglers that made it out of the water after the hurricane crashed their ships. I love those kind of stories because they create great whatifs. What if france had settled florida and not spain. How might the history of our country been different . Might there not have been a United States . That was just fascinating. There are other stories like that. Another thing that fascinated me. To step back, what i said before, since i didnt know a lot about hurricanes but i certainly didnt know a lot about meteorology, almost everything was a big surprise. The battles in the 1800s between amateur and professional meteorologists and how meteorology evolved and in particular how our understanding of hurricanes evolved was just fascinating to me. The role of cuba in early hurricane science and understanding and the role of father Benigno Bynes was fascinating. To hear that president mckinley said during the spanishamerican war when it started that he was more afraid of what hurricanes are going to do to American Forces than any military attacks that might occur in the spanish. Every single story in the book i was excited to read about them because they were telling me about new aspects of American History and the evolution of the Hurricane Hunter planes and how the first person decided, joseph butler, to fly into a hurricane when nobody had done it before. And how sputnik led to the ultimate creation of satellites and the creation of weather satellites and still have today with all of our technology all of our ability to watch a hurricane from inception to dissolution to understand how much uncertainty there still is computer models can only take you so far. Look at hurricane laura which really devastated parts of louisiana last week just look at what happened in the last few hours before it came ashore. If it had been 15 miles in either direction the story might have been quite different. The storm surge mightve actually reached 20 feet. There were still questions about where it was going to occur and what the ultimate impact was going to be. That again sort of relates to the notion of how hurricanes affect American History if just the vagaries of meteorological happenstance and fa hurricane had jogged 20 to 30 miles this direction versus that direction just think how different our history would be. Look at new orleans where the bookstore is. Hurricane katrina had a major effect on new orleans. But just imagine if instead of making landfall 30 miles to the east, it had given new orleans a direct hit. That might have been a very different story and, believe it or not, and even worse story than what came out of it. Wended hurricane forecasting really become decent for many many years of course the u. S. Weather service was hopelessly incompetent when it came to forecasting and tracking hurricanes. Is there a particular turning point in history one the u. S. Government, meteorologists really became expert and reliable . It really has to do with their ability to get eyes on the storm. With the advent of radio there is the opportunity for ships to send in reports to meteorologists on land, they could supplement that with information that was sent over telegraphs back in the early years and telephones later on. But really it started to change fundamentally in the 1940s and 50s one the Hurricane Hunter planes came online so when a hurricane got within a tank full of gas or a plane basically to go out into the atlantic or the caribbean and see where this hurricane was, see what it was doing, send instruments into the hurricane and then relay that information back to the meteorologists on land, their ability to track hurricanes was much improved. But with satellites of course it was a whole different ballgame. Now you can literally watch a hurricane develop, see has crept across the atlantic or up through the caribbean into the gulf coast. And never lose sight of it. Adding to that not only were we able to see that and get gather data but with sophisticated computerized weather prediction models we started to come online in the 1950s and have greatly improved since then then we have the added piece of the armor meant terry and for the meteorologists to take all the data that they are collecting in real time, add that to their historical understanding of hurricanes and hurricane tracks and give us much better idea of where this hurricane is going, how powerful its likely to be and, therefore, what kind of protections are what kind of steps we need to take to deal with it before it actually arrives. The ark of our understanding of hurricanes our meteorological understanding and ability to track them as they evolve and move across the globe is just night and day compared to what it was 50 years ago or 100 years ago certainly. We are fortunate that doesnt reduce the impact of the hurricanes, because one of the annoying things is that there is nothing we can do as human beings to avert their strike. All we can do is better plan and prepare and deal with the aftermath. In a narrative history such as yours and which you are dealing with the in Human Interest stories obviously sometimes there are heroic figures that span out, one of mine is nash roberts longtime weatherman there he never used technology he never used green screen. You know these guys sitting on the screen like this and always use the squeaky markers on a whiteboard. The forecasters you think of a hurricane save lives. One of the heroes actually had remnants today to stop hurricane laura came through really did a number on Cameron Parish. There to be dealing with that for many years. Not too long ago, 1957 hurricane audrey came roaring ashore in the end of june and basically leveled Cameron Parish but there is one individual i start the book out with doctor cecil clark, his wife sybil, he had a clinic in cameron and during the height of the hurricane he left his house and he left behind his wife, three of his youngest children, and they are made, to go into the clinic to help the patients who were there and anybody who might be coming in after the hurricane. He didnt make it to the clinics, his car got thrown off the road by water and he sh